McCHICKEN®, McNUGGETS® and McFLURRY® immediately conjure up images of the ‘family of marks’ owned by McDonald’s Corporation. Indeed, the ‘family of marks’ doctrine is well-established in trademark law. Be that as it may, can it be said that there exists a family of marks when they are not owned by the same entity? What needs […]

In the recent Singapore High Court case of Louis Vuitton Malletier v Megastar Shipping Pte Ltd [2017] SGHC 305, the Court held that a freight forwarder who was unwittingly sent counterfeit goods into Singapore for transshipment was not liable for trademark infringement. The case concerned two shipments from China bound for Indonesia via Singapore. The […]

A clash between two tech giants before the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS), Apple Inc. v Xiaomi Singapore Pte Ltd [2017] SGIPOS 10, ended when the ruling favored Xiaomi (“the Applicant”) to register the mark ‘MI PAD’ for its computer tablet products in the face of a move from Apple Inc. (“the Opponent”), the […]

Introduction Parallel imports are genuine goods that are put on the market by a trade mark proprietor in one country, and subsequently purchased and imported into another country for resale. Singapore permits parallel importation. As such, it is an issue that arises frequently in practice, but is rarely litigated on. In Samsonite IP Holdings Sarl […]

Despite the recent popularity surge in old technological phenomena, with Nintendo’s Pokémon being ubiquitous on small hand-held screens again, and Nokia having relaunched – to widespread excitement – its iconic 3310 phone, it is not always easy for tech giants to hold on to past products and features in the hope of one day re-marketing […]

In a bid to bolster its intellectual property portfolio in Singapore, German car manufacturer Audi (‘the applicant’) recently succeeded partially in the revocation of a device mark in Audi AG v Lim Ching Kwang. At the hearing before the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS), the applicant had applied for both revocation of Mr Lim […]